SEMblog

Blackberry - not a subject I usually touch on, but as I am using a BES variant with my Exchange system I thought I would post this little snippet.

Recently exchanged by very old 7230 Blackberry for a new Curve 8310. I found that my previously published applications of Google Maps and Google search were not appearing on the device.

A look through the event long on the server gave me this error:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: BlackBerry Policy Service
Event Category: None
Event ID: 20000
Date:  29/03/2009
Time:  21:15:32
User:  N/A
Computer: BES-SERVER
Description:
Device info for hardwareID 0x8d000f03 could not be found.

No idea what that meant, and I couldn't find anything clear on Google either.
However looking through older posts on some forums from when the 8700 series was released, I was pointed to a file called device.xml, which can be found in this location: "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Research In Motion\AppLoader"

Apparently if your device doesn't appear in the list, then you will get the above error.

I am using Blackberry Professional Edition, which is currently on 4.1.4, whereas the current version of Blackberry Enterprise Server is 4.1.6 (or very close, at the time of writing). The device.xml file was quite out of date and the ID number in the error message did not appear in the file. I needed to update the file!

You can get an updated device.xml by installing the latest Desktop Software from Blackberry somewhere. (4.7 at the time of writing) I have seen references to the desktop software being installed on the server, but I already had it on my laptop for playing around with the device. It will be found in the same location on both the server and the workstation. I went from a file that was only 8kb in size to a 16kb file.

I simply copied the file from my laptop in to the same location on my Blackberry server re-ran the "loader /index" command and then restarted the Blackberry Policy service. The application pushed out to the device shortly afterwards.